First off, I don't play paintball competitively, so everything I write here is somewhat speculative.
The problem I see is that paintball isn't taken seriously enough at a competitive level for people to be able to commit to it in such a way that tournaments are fully subscribed to.
For example, football players get paid lord-knows-how much a week, paintballers don't get paid to run around and shoot people, we have to hold down day jobs working crap hours all day and night and we just can't drop that at a moments notice to... run around and shoot people. We don't see any gain for the commitment we'd have to put in.
On top of that, we pay way over the odds as far as gear and fuel prices go.
I'm trying to not be overly negative but it's kind of hard.
When I lived in North Dakota it was exactly the same, there was a decent sized core of paintball players with no way to get to a tournament apart from once every few years when the National Guard of all organizations hosted a MOVING tournament from one city to the next. Maybe that's the answer - have a tournament which is hosted at several locations, teams sign up to one of the sites and play only there? But again there needs to be decent funding in place for it to be worth while for people to actually attend.
Of course, this won't attract everyone, because that's essentially ignoring the "scenario" paintballers, so does this mean we need TWO series', or are the scenario players happy with the occasional big game like NvS?
I think we, as people that own our own kit, ignore the "bread and butter" of the paintball business, the site operators, such as DF, Sab, Apoc to name a few that I actually know of, there are some GREAT sites out there, and there are some CRAP ones, too, but they all have plenty in common, especially the chain sites such as DF -- they aren't promoting people to actually get involved into buying their own gear. I think plenty of punters think that if they want to play ball they'll have to travel down to some site and pay £6 for 100 balls, which isn't fair, really. No other sport does this, does it? You don't have to pay £6 every time you want to play 30 minutes of football!
The uptake of the sport would be incredible if there was some way of getting people more interested into getting into buying their own gear, joining a team (something I've yet to do) and get involved at their local site/tournament.
Ramble over.